Attempts at covering songwriting royalty require a good excuse, I’d say, but Andrew Bird has one here with his unique arrangement of Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You,” in which the song’s sturdy melody gets an instrumental fiddle part before a strummed, ukulele-esque violin arrives in time for the verses. Bird plays with the room’s natural acoustics a bit, too, building up a reverent nod that touches on the original’s bittersweet tone. Check out a clip, live from Amsterdam earlier this month, below:
Meanwhile, plenty of new material is making the rounds in support of this year’s Break It Yourself LP. Here’s an intimate, 2- man radio session of “Give It Away” that serves the tune well: